Virtual Alchemy om Band of Crusaders: "Vi har ikke lyst til at appellere til alle"

Via blandt andet FromSoftware-titler er der igen meget fokus på sværhedsgrader i spil, og at udviklere skal kunne visualisere en spiloplevelse der ikke forsøger at appellere til alle, men snarere decideret gerne vil skille fårene fra bukkene.

Under Gamescom talte vi med studiet Virtual Alchemy, der arbejder på et mørkt strategiske RPG ved navn Band of Crusaders. Det er designet til at svært, til at udfordre og frustrere, og det er med fuldt overlæg. Art Director Kamil Mickiewicz siger dette:

We are very aware we do not make a game for everybody, everyone. That's an important caveat for us. We don't want to cater to all the audiences out there, you know, how usually modern gaming works these days. We know we are quite hardcore about our approach. We want to, you know, strike first and foremost the core communities of games like Battle Brothers, like Wartales or Mount & Blade Bannerlord. Those are like direct references, but also we bring our twist, as Dominik rightfully mentioned, from games like Dragon Age Origins, for example, or Pillars of Eternity or even StarCraft II, WarCraft III. Why I bring those examples? Because the combat system in our game is almost RTP, which is like real-time with pause, and I say almost because we don't have full pause. We actually have slow-motion mechanics. I might mention that one of the recent releases, I guess, that featured this particular mechanic is Aliens Dark Descent, if you guys are familiar with this one. It's like sci-fi, so different cup of tea, but they have slow-mo. Main difference between what we do and they have is that in their case, you control the whole squad at once. So, yeah, if you order to, you know, strike with a certain ability or whatever, the correct guy is being chosen and everything is like kind of homogenised, like automated. In our case, you have like RTS controls. You have control over individual units. So it plays more like, imagine WarCraft III, but you play only champions and not like the, you know, the trash guys."

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